Robot for decontamination with 3D move on sensing

Toward reconstruction of Tohoku region in Japan devastated by nuclear disaster, decontamination work has been progressing. But a large volume of collected contaminated soil is waiting for decontamination at temporarily-constructed custody facilities. Since the volume of stored soil is huge, the task to reduce the volume of contaminated soil using dehydrator machine called Filter Press (FP) appears to be important. The task to reduce the soil volume means that separation of concentrated radioactive soil and decontaminated clean soil for returning to the place where the soil is gathered. Having radioactive soil concentrated has a good facet of reducing the volume of radiative substances, it also brings a risk that the workers for the FP should be exposed to radiations. As measures to reduce radiation exposure of workers to zero, the FP should be redesigned into full automatic machine system, requiring robots that enable visual controlled task with '3D Move on Sensing (3D-MoS).' In this study, based on the model including attribute information such as color and shape of the target object, the robot can detect target pose automatically by 3D-MoS. And then, the 3D-MoS system has been proved to be valid for decontamination task, i.e., removing the cloth of FP even though the position of components of FP be uncertain. (author)